It is not the best moment that aviation has lived since it was invented, and even less so for the larger planes like the Boeing 747, the Airbus 380; After World War II, aircraft manufacturers are driven by a large amount of passenger demand to create large airplanes which were introduced since the 1970s with the entry of the Boeing 747 nicknamed the “Jumbo” this had 4 engines and its autonomy and passenger capacity managed to beat its competitors of those times such as McDonnell Douglas 10, thus enhancing the Golden age of commercial aviation.
The pandemic
Covid-19, which is an acronym for coronavirus disease 2019, is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it appeared in the city of Wuhan, China in December 2019, due to its high spread, and sometimes the lack of symptoms in the first days of the contagion made it unmanageable and it spread worldwide, causing what today we call the covid pandemic.
This Pandemic, like all branches of the economy, has been affecting a large part of humanity, because the easiest way to stop the contagion is confinement and avoid contact with other people to prevent the transmission of the virus. That is why one of the main affected today is the aviation industry; this is because many countries have closed their borders to prevent an infected person from entering the country.
Airline problems
It is for all this that many airlines are in the red for different cases, be it the cost of fuel, airport costs, and that today the smallest aircraft can fly with a lot of autonomy, making these more profitable at when making a flight, making large aircraft such as the B747, the A380 and even the A340 much more unviable for any company.
Due to this pandemic, many airlines such as British Airways, Lufthansa, Iberia, Qatar, among others, have decided to move forward with the elimination of their large fleets of 4-engine aircraft, which have been their jewels for many years, due to the lack of passengers where the plane makes the flight with less than 70% of the seats. This makes the flight not profitable enough for airlines, making their vision of the future are smaller planes or simply with 2 engines which will generate greater profits.
2020 hard year for human beings
With the arrival of 2020 and as they say, the new stage of being human, which is living with the problem left by the Covid, many aircraft operators have advanced the withdrawal of their most emblematic aircraft due to, as we have said, their lack of passengers and the cost of leaving these Aircraft parked in an Airport which can reach 1000 Euros a day, which makes it much more effective to withdraw them, instead of keeping them until the consequences of the Coronavirus pass.
Nowadays, the manufacturing companies of these type of aircraft are planning to cancel their plants where these enormous aircraft are created, due to their decrease in their sales, which makes their maintenance unfeasible, on the other hand, the sales of spare parts for these aircraft have also been decreasing, so we have to keep waiting, but I think that from today on, due to this type of situation, we have stopped seeing those majestic planes and we have put an end to the golden age of aviation with large volume planes.
What do you think of this topic? Do you think we will stop seeing large aircraft for the transfer of passengers?
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Image by Kevin Hackert via flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
